Bartosz Milewski rozpoczął swój marcowy artykuł zatytułowany Life and (Thermal) Death in the Universe w sposób tak dowcipny, że jedynie piosenki Młynarskiego wywołują u mnie podobne uczucie zadowolenia w rozbawieniu. Wspomniany fragment zamieszczam poniżej, i jednocześnie zachęcam do zapoznania się z całym tekstem.
I want you to perform a little experiment. Take an egg, put it in a blender, and run it for ten seconds.
Oh, I forgot to tell you to first remove the eggshell. No problem, let’s run the blender in the opposite direction for ten seconds, and we’ll get the egg back.
It doesn’t work, does it? The reason is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. Blending an egg increased its entropy. Unblending it would decrease entropy. But there is a workaround: feed the blended egg to a chicken, and you will get a new egg. Granted, you might have to feed it more than one egg, but still: the miracle of life! Life seems to go against the general trend of the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course, life cannot flourish in a completely isolated system, so the laws of physics are safe. A chicken can produce an egg only by increasing the entropy of its environment and, indirectly, that of the Sun.